October 2010

Moving from equipment to the cloud is very smart move and something I noticed many vendors at the recent ITEXPO in Los Angeles were focused on doing. Just as VARs and channel partner/MSPs have shifted from once selling hardware to services for the recurring revenue and to offset shrinking margins, I expect many hardware providers to follow suit.

As the trend continues expect prices for services to drop in response to greater supply in the market. Why?

At ITEXPO I met with Gene Fay, Senior Vice President for Nine Technology, an online backup and recovery service designed for MSPs to brand and resell. Nine Technology’s "Powered by Nine" data backup and restore solutions enable managed service providers (MSPs) to offer cost-effective and secure online backup and recovery services for desktops, laptops and servers.

One of their main claims to fame is their patented global deduplication process. It uses "block level" global data deduplication and compression to minimize data size, number of files and bandwidth utilization. Gene Fay claimed that their partners have done some testing and Nine Technology is 5-15x faster at recovering files than the popular Mozy or Carbonite solutions.

Some new features recently announced include:

Seeded initial backups shipped to the data center

Semi-continuous data protection

Granular SQL server backups using VSS snapshots

Automated self-service branding of partner client software

Web-based restore processes

Updated, easier-to-control GUI

The "seeded" initial backups are a key feature, since many organizations have terabytes of data that would take a long time to backup even over a fast WAN Internet connection.

Last week at ITEXPO in Los Angeles there was the standard Free Public WiFi option which you see virtually anywhere there are other wireless devices. I know not to click on this network now but I am sure I was fooled by it some time ago.

Basically the network is created by a "virus" and is being propagated by Windows XP machines. It does not appear to be malicious but clicking on it will not get you on the Internet so don't bother and save yourself time, energy and aggravation.

Here are the details - someone asked me about this network at the show and I told them not to click on it. I couldn't recall why - so I hope the person is a reader and this answers their question.

In short the company just released preliminary third-quarter numbers and said they had nine orders over $1 million with two of them being larger than $2M. I am not sure how this compares with past quarters but regardless, these are significant customer sizes in an era of price compression.

The company says its cloud offering is doing well and you may recall company CMO Joe Staples spent some time recently (video) in the TMC Newsroom giving me details of the launch.

ININ expects total revenue to be between $41-$42 million with GAAP net income between $3.3-$3.9M. Last year the number was $2.8M meaning an increase of at least 17% over last year's sales.

According to founder and CEO Dr. Don Brown, the size of the deals gives the company increased operating leverage and revenue growth.

ININ CMO Joe Staples addresses a standing-room-only crowd last week at the first ever TMC Social CRM Expo

As I wait here in LAX Airport - I continue to decompress from what was the largest ITEXPO ever. There were more booths and content that at any previous TMC event - ever. We partnered with a record number of groups and provided content as wide ranging from CDMA development to optical to smart grid.

Generally the sessions were packed and we learned a great deal about your preferences and expect us to keep content areas where rooms were filled and delete topics which were not so much.

My conversations in the industry were upbeat and positive in general - Avaya showed Flare off multiple times, ShoreTel is moving upmarket, Xirrus is doing its part to replace wired Ethernet and the smart grid, MSP, 4G and M2M spaces seem to hold much promise for growth.

So thank you all for coming to the show - and especially those of you braved the record traffic, accidents and mudslides & green flag alert due to the massive LA storm to be there. I heard numerous stories of people who couldn't make it to the center and we almost had to cancel a keynote due to the massive traffic delays our speaker was stuck in.

I met with Todd Carothers, VP of Product Management at TMC's ITEXPO in Los Angeles to hear about Counterpath's latest patents and new product offerings. Todd gave me one of the coolest demos of mobile VoIP I've ever seen! I captured the demo in one of two videos that I've included in this blog post. Definitely a must watch!

I'm off to moderate an ITEXPO session, but came across some interesting news announced at ITEXPO I wanted to share.

Check it out:

2600hz Introduces "PromoCalling" - Free VoIP Phones for Business

Ad-Supported Phone Provides Competitive Free Calling Option to Enterprise, Small Business Market via SIP-enabled Devices
Los Angeles, CA, October 6, 2010 (ITEXPO: Booth # 606) - The 2600hz Project, a subsidiary of VoIP, Inc. today announced free SIP phone service for VoIP carriers. The ad-supported system is designed to empower today's VoIP providers to compete with free calling services already available on the Internet. The white-label service bundles features like find-me, follow-me, ring groups, meet-me conferencing and voicemail into a hosted platform. PromoCalling enables carriers to compete with similar offerings from Google Voice and Skype taking communication a step further by operating via business grade SIP phones rather than web or soft phone devices.

"Smaller VoIP carriers face fierce competition in a marketplace where Google and Skype offer services that are free," said Darren Schreiber, CEO and Co-Founder of 2600hz.

I met with Sonus Networks' Mykola Konrad, Director, Enterprise Management at ITEXPO today. It's not every day that I get to meet someone who formerly worked on the Microsoft Surface product, a very cool technology. It's basically an extra-large iPad and Mykola mentioned Microsoft was considering something like the iPad two years ago.

Anyway, back to Sonus, Mykola talked about some of their products, including the GSX9000. One feature it offers is the ability for non-VoIP digital phones to register to their ASX (SIP registrar).

David Byrd Vice President of Marketing and Product Management for Broadvox stopped by to speak with me at ITEXPO. You should definitely check out David's SIP and Serve by a Foodie blog. He provides interesting insights on VoIP, but also blogs some delectable recipes. He also mixes some VoIP and food metaphors.

I met with Mike Wilson, VP of Sales & Marketing for UM Labs at ITEXPO today to learn more about their secure VoIP offering. At ITEXPO they announced their 1.5 release, which steps up interoperability amongst various IP-PBXS and now it works with Skype (Skype Connect).
Mike explained that a lot of independent dealers across the world who also use Skype, can now connect their PBXs to these Skype users and save a lot of money on conference calls. Their solution acts as the "glue" allowing Avaya to connect to Cisco, or Shoretel to Avaya, etc. They have a built-in scripting engine and can adjust paths between switch and trunking provider or two switches to ensure interoperability.

As part of this release they are stepping up encryption, which he claimed already had incredibly low latency.

AudioCodes MediaPack™ 252 (MP-252) is a sophisticated, feature-rich, multimedia home gateway for broadband networks with Multi-play support. Launched at TMC's ITEXPO, it sports a built-in ADSL2+ modem, multiple antenna wireless LAN connectivity, DECT handsets supporting HD VoIP, Bluetooth interface for connecting cellular phones and optional battery backup. With its USB ports (3 in one model, 1 in another) , it even has support for being a print server, and can connect to file servers and UPnP AV Media Servers. I spoke with AudioCodes Alan Percy, Director of Business Development in the ITEXPO press room to learn more about this innovative all-in-one gateway for Multi-play services.

More Features Than You Can Shake a Stick At
The ADSL/ADSL2+ modem supports up to 24Mbps. It features a 10/100 Ethernet WAN port (optional connection to cable modem or FTTH ONU) and Four 10/100 Ethernet LAN ports.

ITEXPO hosted the 2nd annual Startup Camp where startup companies in the telecom, VoIP, wireless, CRM, and social media industries give a short 5 minute demo of their product or service. Then a few panelists critique their presentation. It lead to some interesting critiques. You'll definitely want to attend the next Startup Camp if you missed this one!

The keynote speaker at StartupCamp was Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte, who has been actively involved in the future of communications for years, dating back to his involvement in what became the Gizmo Project (Gizmo5), and to his executive roles with Yahoo!’s Real-time Communications Group.

His keynote was one of the highlights of the event and I'm glad I was able to record about 80% of his insightful and funny presentation.

I met with Marc Fribush at ITEXPO and we discussed their hosted Asterisk offering. I met Marc previously at TMC Days, when several VoIP and telecom companies visited TMC's offices. It's an impressive product. In about 60s you can "spin up" your very own virtualized hosted copy of Asterisk.